Jann Wenner
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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fRolling Stone is an American magazine devoted to music, politics and popular culture that is published bi-weekly.
In the 1970s, the magazine also helped launch the careers of many prominent authors, including Cameron Crowe, Lester Bangs, Joe Eszterhas, Patti Smith and P. J. O'Rourke. It was at this point that the magazine ran some of its most famous stories, including that of the Patty Hearst abduction odyssey. One interviewer, speaking for many his peers, said that he bought his first copy of the magazine upon initial arrival on his college campus, describing it as a "rite of passage".
Overview
Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J. Gleason. Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the 1970s, the magazine embraced and reported on the hippy counterculture. Rolling Stone's rise to fame was synchronous with that of such bands as the Grateful Dead. It was so popular during this era that a song dedicated to it, "Cover of the Rolling Stone" by Dr Hook and the Medicine Show, became a hit single.
By the 1980s, despite still nominally employing icons such as Hunter S. Thompson and the infamous rock-journalist badboy Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone had become institutionalized and adopted mainstream ideas that it had shunned earlier (e.g., employee drug testing). The magazine moved to New York to be closer to the advertising industry, and many date its change in culture from this point.
In the early 2000s, facing declining revenue due to the rapid rise of young men's magazines such as Maxim and FHM, Rolling Stone reinvented itself, targeting a lower age group and offering more sex-oriented content.
See also
